Virgin Media’s 2016 price hike is still costing it customers

Virgin Media is still feeling the impact of last November’s price hike according to the firm’s latest market update which revealed churn – the percentage of customers cancelling services – was 15.0% in the first quarter of the year.

Last year the UK’s largest cable operator hiked prices across its product range, a move which was greeted with dismay by customers and has provoked a wave of cancellations.

The firm insists “customer disconnects decreased sequentially due to a diminishing impact” of the rise but admitted that they “remained elevated” year on year.

Virgin, which also operates in Ireland, reported 82,000 broadband internet net additions but no longer breaks out figures between the two territories.

However in mobile, where it does still report on a country by country basis, the firm’s 27,000 new UK monthly mobile phone subscribers were “largely offset” by a fall in its pay as you go basis.

In the TV sector Virgin reported 39,000 net additions, a marked improvement on the 18,000 net loss seen in Q1 2016 which it says was “fuelled by the highest quarterly TV growth in the UK since Q4 2007”.

While it didn’t provide numbers, Virgin also claimed that take-up of its new V6 set top box (pictured above) “has been robust”.

Despite years of denying performance problems with its aged Tivo boxes, which customers complain are “slow” and “laggy”, Virgin says “customer satisfaction for the new device is significantly higher than for our other set-top boxes in the UK.”